Some San Diego homeowners are going to great lengths to make sure their property is equipped in every way to withstand wildfires, like the one that burned 16 hundred homes last October. KPBS reporter Alison St John visited a homeowner in Fallbrook who did a lot of research before building her new house on a scenic backcountry hillside. (story continues below)
Workmen are leveling the dirt around Annie Atkins' front door, ready to pour the concrete path that curves around much of her home.
The view from the back patio sweeps across a rural valley. She used to have a trailer on the property, but that was before the Rice Fire burned though last October.
Atkins : The trailer was sitting right here and it ended up being a 27 foot garden sculpture … it burned. But my heart goes out to my neighbors, I have 5 that entirely lost their homes.
Atkins and her husband started building their new home last December, they moved in in July. But they’ve been planning its fire safety features ever since the Cedar fire swept though San Diego in 2003.
Atkins : The roof top is red tile...
Atkins chose her roof carefully. Under every curved tile she put a bird stop.
Atkins : it’s like a little plug that stops birds from nesting underneath your tile but it will also stop the little burning bits from blowing in underneath and catching your roof top on fire.
Under the tile is a heavy tar sub-sealer that she made sure was flame resistant.
Atkins : I even took a lighter to it to see if I could catch it, but it never caught flame
It comes as a surprise to find out that the walls of Atkins' house are straw bale. But she says, unlike the straw bales you see in Western movies, this straw is so compressed there’s no oxygen inside for flames to feed on. The bales are coated inside and out with at least half an inch of plaster and stucco.
Atkins : so you have this fire proof coating over the house - and then the eves of the house are what are called “boxed eves” and they’re stucco-ed. There’s not any horizontal wood that would support flame.
Atkins goes inside the house for a moment to hit a switch and demonstrate electric rolling shutters on her windows.
Atkins: They’re more common on the east coast where they have hurricanes.
But in the advent of a fire we’ll drop them down into a closed and locked position which will prevent any burning embers from bursting the windows by impact.
Sitting in the cool, insulated interior of Atkins’ home, Yvette Urrea Moe of the County’s Office of Emergency Services says windows proved to be a vulnerable point for many homes that burned last October.
Moe : A lot of homes caught fire last year because the winds were so strong last year they literally picked up your patio furniture and blew ‘em into your window and that’s how homes caught fire.
There’s a sprinkler system inside the house, but sprinkler heads are also installed outside, around the edge of the roof. Moe says that’s another of Atkins’ creative solutions.
Moe: She has it hooked up to her above ground pool .. her pool is up on a hill... and
in the event that she had to evacuate, she could just hit a switch and the pool water will start draining into those spigots and it’ll protect the exterior of her home.
Outside on the hillside below the pool, Anne Atkins has cut down some old avocado trees, and there are small native shrubs struggling to gain a foothold in the dry dirt.
Atkins: We have ceanothus and the low growing coyote bush which will act as a ground cover and some Manzanita, so as we find different plants that are California natives we’ve plunk them in.
Atkins does have a bank of green cherimoya trees below the house that got singed but weren’t destroyed when the Rice Fire came through last year.
She scans a nearby ridge, where the wood frame of a new home stands bare and vulnerable. Below in the valley, a flag, the stars and stripes, waves bravely above a small trailer.
Atkins: The RVS and trailers you see here, these are people who once had homes, so they are living on their property and getting things ready for the rebuild.
Atkins and her neighbors are doing their best to be creative about ways to prepare for the fire seasons ahead.
Alison St John, KPBS News.
